15 quotes
Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing.
Flying Dutch (1991)
It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation.
Flying Dutch (1991)
If he had any philosophy of life, it was that everything happens by accident, and that at any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance.
Flying Dutch (1991)
An over-excited accountant, like the University of Hull, is a contradiction in terms.
Flying Dutch (1991)
His role in history was rather like that of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there's always a lot of it.
Flying Dutch (1991)
What was going to happen now? In the end, every community and grouping of human beings (except, of course, the Rolling Stones) drifts apart and goes its separate ways.
Flying Dutch (1991)
I see what you mean about making a will, actually, although I still maintain that forty quid spent on deciding what's going to happen after you're dead is a waste of good beer money.
Flying Dutch (1991)
Jane was a child of the media age, and there lurked in the back of her mind the instinctive belief that if a thing wasn't on the news, it couldn't really have happened after all.
Flying Dutch (1991)
My mother can do it, of course, but then she understands machines. She tapes the Australian soaps, which I call a perverse use of advanced technology.
Flying Dutch (1991)
It is galling, to say the least, to have been to every place in the world and then not know where somewhere is. It's rather like having a doctorate in semiconductor physics and not being able to wire a plug. You begin to wonder whether it's all been worthwhile.
Flying Dutch (1991)
It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch – or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea.
Flying Dutch (1991)
Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me.
Flying Dutch (1991)
Love? Love was a concept with which he was no longer comfortable. At his age, it did not do to take anything too seriously, and the depressing thing about love was the seriousness which had to go with it, just as these days you couldn't seem to get jumbo sausage and chips in a pub without a salad being thrown in as well.
Flying Dutch (1991)
When he left Quincy's he returned to the studios and went to see the man who was going to tell him everything he needed to know about sports broadcasting in twenty-five minutes.
“The main thing,” said the expert, is to turn up on the right day at the right place and keep the sound recordists out of the bar. Leave everything else to the cameramen, and you'll do all right. That's it.”
Flying Dutch (1991)
In a long life, reflected the Flying Dutchman, I have come across many bloody silly ideas, but two of them are in a class of their own for pure untainted idiocy. One was the Court of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and the other is the privatised British telephone service.
A long way away, definitely in another continent and quite probably in another dimension, a little voice ask him to repeat the name.
Flying Dutch (1991)